Mechanical and electrical engineering



Machines for the world

When a Formula 1 racing car engine is briefly revved up to 19,000 revs per minute, the whole world looks on in rapturous admiration. When a centrifugal spinning machine reaches 60,000 revs – and does so every minute round the clock seven days a week, that’s just mundane daily life. These days yarns are produced three times faster than before – thanks to the inventive textile machinery industry in the Lower Rhine region. For 130 years it has been surprising the industry with innovations again and again, ever since England lost its lead at the end of the 19th century.

Whenever anyone says the name Eduard Küsters, they also mean the “Swimming Roll Küster”. It revolutionized the manufacturing and finishing processes in the textiles, non-woven fabrics and paper industries. His deflection-controlled roll led to an enormous leap in capacity; 24,000 rolls run today in machines all over the world. And the son of Krefeld’s name is in the American paper industry “Hall of Fame" – one of the few Europeans to have been awarded this honor.

Machine construction in the Lower Rhine region grew up with the textiles industry and brought forth world leaders, for example Trützschler and the spinning preparation machines. It provided critical impetus for the textiles industry to produce high-quality products, but over time it has developed in other sectors too and manufactures machines and plants for nearly all sectors – from nuclear technology to tool making, or, to be more specific, from the “Castor” to high-performance CNC turning machines or flexible lathe and milling centers with five-axis processing (Monforts). The Lower Rhine region is home to major companies and is thus the European center for engraved rolls. These rolls are used for gravure printing on carpets, wallpaper, plastic film, packaging and wood veneers, for embossing wall and floor surfaces, metal sheets, synthetic leather and textiles as well as all sorts of laminations.

Leading technology on a large scale: the company Siempelkamp can be entered into the Guinness Book of Records. This year it made the largest cast part in the world, an upper bar for a thick plate straightening press weighing 252 tons, and then made it to measure in its own panel cutting machine – down to the last tenth of a millimeter. Siempelkamp is the only company in the world that can not only cast parts of this magnitude, but can also process them.

Even bigger heavy-weights regularly leave the halls of Areva Energietechnik in Mönchengladbach, previously known as Schorch. In the spring of 2009 for instance, a heavy load consisting of a 442-ton transformer set off for East Germany. It was stripped down by about 120 tons for the transport. The transformers from Mönchengladbach are in great demand all round the world. The name of the company founder Max Schorch lives on in the spin-off company Elektrische Maschinen und Antriebe GmbH, which manufactures asynchronous motors for all industrial and municipal purposes.

High-tech made in Mönchengladbach also stands for parking lot ticket machines, petrol pumps, rail signals and public transport ticket machines as developed by Scheidt & Bachmann and sold in 50 countries. The company had to expand its capacities in 2009 because of the popularity of its technically advanced systems and customized systems.

The ventilation technology specialist Trox makes a substantial contribution to fire-fighting at Düsseldorf airport and to air circulation at Barraja airport in Madrid.

At first glance you don’t see the technological finesse of agricultural machines, yet they function today in almost the same way as processing centers for machine tool manufacture: they complete several processes in one go. As such it’s no coincidence that the farming equipment manufacturer in the town of Alpen is the market leader for reversible ploughs and cultivators in Germany. Worldwide it sells around 14,000 machines a year, and from 2010 a 12-meter-wide seeder is set to go into series production; it is geared towards the Russian market in particular.

Although the invention of the seamless pipes was made in the Bergisches Land, the machines to make them came from the brothers Meer in Mönchengladbach, who laid the foundations for SMS Meer as it is now known, a company in the production of plants and machines; the company is the global leader in many sectors of pipe, long product and forging technology.

So that electricity and data get to the place where they’re needed, Nexans (formerly Kabel Rheydt) or Bröckskes in Süchteln make the required cables. The Transrapid in Shanghai works also thanks to cables from the Lower Rhine region.

The product spectrum of the more than 150 companies in the mechanical and electrical engineering sectors in the Lower Rhine region is wide-ranging and geared towards international markets. The two sectors make up one of the most important industries in the Lower Rhine region, employing around 25,000 people and with a turnover of about 6 billion euros.

In good company

Initiatives

maex-online: WFMG Wirtschaftsförderung Mönchengladbach GmbH (Mönchengladbach business development) paved the way for a regional online exchange, which companies from the machine and plant construction sector, as well as related fields, can use to exchange inquiries regarding machine capacities and quotes with partners from the region.

Contact

Bertram Gaiser
Geschäftsführer
Standort Niederrhein GmbH
02131 / 92 68 592
gaiser@standort-niederrhein.de

Did you know that ...

... a citizen of Wesel (Peter Minuit) was involved in the founding of New York?

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